On Mon, 11 Jul 2011, Yaron wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Jul 2011, Mike Miller wrote:
>
>> I was wondering.  I didn't see anything about it in the BIOS, but yes 
>> there is a VGA output.  That makes me think there's a jumper somewhere.
>
> Jumper? This is 2011! Your BIOS should have a thing saying which display 
> to initialise first, the internal or a PCI-E or something. That might 
> help... sadly there's usually no way to DISABLE the internal display 
> alltogether.

Like I said, I couldn't find anything in the BIOS about displays.  I guess 
it is in there somewhere using some kind of tricky language that I don't 
understand.  I'll look into it.


> When you're in text mode, it usually goes to all connected monitors. But 
> when you switch to graphics you have to tell X which card to use.

It does show a splash screen at one point before going to text-based 
console mode, strangely.  I thought it was a graphic with a shaded 
background, but maybe not.


> Honestly unless you're doing high-powered 3D graphics you might be fine 
> just removing your video card and using the internal one. If not though 
> you might want to connect your monitor to that one temporarily and use 
> Gnome's display manager thing to tell it to use the other card.
>
> (also, perfect time to get a second monitor!)


No, no, no...  I'm using a dual DVI card with one 1680x1050 monitor and 
the second converted to HDMI and going to my 1080p HDTV.  I can't go back 
to VGA now that I'm addicted to this.  ;-)

Mike